For former Montreal Gazette contributor Mark Abley, writing about a father who was never much given to talking about himself represented a chance to explore the gap between “what we choose to remember and what we just do not understand at the time.” Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette

Our meeting in a Verdun café marked the first time Mark Abley had talked about his new book since it went public, and at times he was hesitant, as if still working out how to address a subject that has been so central to his life and, especially in recent years, his work.

Harry Abley died in 1994. For his only child, an early sign that the book he “needed to do” would be no simple project came soon after, when he was asked by the now-defunct Montreal Anglican to write a short, 300- to 400-word obituary.

“Out of courtesy, I showed it to my mother,” he recalled. “She asked me to make three changes, and the things she wanted changed were so innocent and mild and non-revealing that I was astonished. Fine, though — it meant a lot more to her than it did to me. But it meant that while I was psychically in her presence, I couldn’t write this book. So after some early attempts, I put it aside, and she lived until 2012. It was only then — and not immediately; it took a year or so — that I finally went back to it and said, ‘It’s now or never.’ ”

The journey Abley traces encompasses his parents’ working-class youth in the U.K. and their post-Second World War emigration to Canada, with spells in Sault Ste. Marie, Lethbridge and, for the longest period, Saskatoon. Earning at best a modest living as a teacher, church organist and choir leader, Harry occasionally made quixotic reverse-emigrations back to England and Wales, all the while battling depression and a gnawing sense of thwarted ambition. Eventually, he and wife Mary relocated to Montreal to be nearer their son and his family — partly at the behest of the son.

For Abley, writing about a father who was never much given to talking about himself represented a chance to explore the gap between, in his words, “what we choose to remember and what we just do not understand at the time.” For an example, he cites the fact that his parents’ relationship grew a lot closer after he left Saskatoon (for a scholarship at Oxford and a peripatetic spell as a freelance writer) and it was just the two of them.

For former Montreal Gazette contributor Mark Abley, writing about a father who was never much given to talking about himself represented a chance to explore the gap between “what we choose to remember and what we just do not understand at the time.”Allen McInnis /
Montreal Gazette

“That was a great surprise to me, and now it seems the most obvious thing in the world,” he said. “I guess that’s what people mean when they talk about the wisdom of age. I suppose the truth was I didn’t want to recognize that I was in a way responsible for a lot of my parents’ unhappiness, especially my father’s. That’s a hard thing for a child or even a young man to come to terms with.”

If the young Abley was reluctant to ask his father a lot about his life, he said, “it was because I was always worrying about him, because we never knew when he might launch into a rant or fall victim to a sudden depression. I didn’t understand the roots of that. My mother had great religious faith and she would always steer me toward religion and away from psychology. In this book I had to reverse that path.”

Asked if his father’s life might have been significantly different had he been born in a later era, in a Britain less rigid in its class constraints, Abley agreed.

“He had the misfortune to have been born a butcher’s son, and to be growing up in the midst of the Great Depression. When he moved to London he got cinema organ training, and he was quickly becoming in demand. But then the war broke out when he was 22 and he enlisted, and by the time he came out, cinema organs were becoming a thing of the past, Britain’s economy was in a dire position and he didn’t have the training that would have allowed him to get a post in a cathedral.”

Harry Abley at the organ in 1976 in Saskatoon. Mark Abley writes of the perseverance his father showed in pursuing music.University of Regina Press

Perhaps the most striking thing about Harry Abley as his son portrays him is the perseverance he showed against all apparent odds in pursuing his music — including, remarkably, a late and ill-fated church-organist stint at age 73 in a down-at-the-heels English coal mining town where he and his wife knew no one. All such attempts, ultimately fruitless, have a cumulative effect: in many ways, The Organist is a study in failure and disappointment. At one point in the book, Abley writes: “My father was as talented at resentment as he was at music.”

“I have wondered sometimes if I was exaggerating his (musical) skills, but I don’t think so,” he said. “The reviews I saw in German and Swiss newspapers, of recitals he gave in those countries, are quite glowing. It’s an anomaly that he would go from experiences like that back to Saskatoon, and certainly by the time he came to Montreal he felt very aggrieved. It didn’t take him long in Montreal to feel resentment that his talent wasn’t recognized here.”

One form Harry’s resentment took was that, living in Montreal, he appeared to make a perverse point of not learning French.

“That’s one of the many ways in which he was just very English,” Abley said with a sigh.

For all the frustrations of his father’s life, though, Abley points out that he “still had the chance to spend a lifetime on the instrument that gave him more pleasure than anything else, and I guess that’s a rare thing.”

What’s more, père left fils at least one undoubted positive legacy: a belief in the idea of vocation.

“Once it had become clear that I wasn’t going to be a musician, he was very happy and perhaps surprised — awed, even — by what did happen to me,” Abley said. “There was never any (parental) pressure to go into any particular career path that might not be suited for me. And on a more intuitive level, I grew up absorbing the importance of using the talents that you have. In my father’s case they were musical, and in my case they were verbal.”

In the process of writing The Organist, Abley noticed an unexpected phenomenon: the work effectively replaced the memories that drove it.

“I found I couldn’t remember incidents except in the terms I’d written them down in,” he said. “It’s wonderful and terrifying, but for me also the lifting of a burden. I don’t have to carry all that around anymore.”

Related

“I have wondered sometimes if I was exaggerating his (musical) skills, but I don’t think so,” Mark Abley says of his father. “The reviews I saw in German and Swiss newspapers … are quite glowing.”Allen McInnis /
Montreal Gazette